How to Increase Motivation & Drive | Huberman Lab Essentials
Channel: Andrew Huberman / Huberman Lab URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLQRAMZi—c
Transcript
[00:00] welcome to huberman lab Essentials where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based [00:06] tools for mental health physical health and performance I’m Andrew huberman and I’m [00:13] a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today we’re going to talk about [00:18] an extremely important topic that’s Central to our daily life and that’s motivation we’re going to talk about [00:25] pleasure and reward what underlies our sense of pleasure or reward we’re going to talk about addictions as well we’re [00:32] going to talk about the neurochemistry of drive and mindset but for now let’s [00:38] just talk about the Neuroscience of motivation and reward of Pleasure and Pain because those are Central to what [00:45] we think of as emotions whether or not we feel good whether or not we feel we’re on track in life whether or not we feel we’re falling behind so motivation [00:53] is fundamental to our daily life it’s what allows us to get out of bed in the morning it’s what allows us to pursue [00:59] longterm goals or short-term goals motivation and the chemistry of [01:04] motivation is tightly wound in with the neurochemistry of movement in fact the [01:11] same single molecule dopamine is responsible for our sense of motivation [01:17] and for movement it’s a fascinating molecule and it lies at the center of so [01:23] many great things in life and it lies at the center of so many terrible aspects of Life namely addiction and certain [01:30] forms of mental disease so if ever there was a double-edged blade in the world of [01:36] Neuroscience it’s dopamine there’s a fundamental relationship between dopamine released in your brain and your [01:42] desire to exert effort and you can actually control the schedule of dopamine release but it requires the [01:49] appropriate knowledge this is one of those cases where understanding the way the dopamine system works will allow you [01:54] to leverage it to your benefit let’s get a few basic facts on the table dopamine [02:00] was discovered in the late 1950s and it was discovered as the precursor meaning [02:06] the thing from which epinephrine or adrenaline is made epinephrine is the [02:11] same thing as adrenaline except in the brain we call it epinephrine epinephrine allows us to get into action [02:19] it stimulates changes in the blood vessels in the heart in the organs and tissues of the body that bias us for [02:25] movement dopamine was initially thought to be just the building block for epinephrine [02:30] however dopamine does a lot of things on its own it’s not always converted to epinephrine dopamine is released from [02:37] several sites in the brain and body but perhaps the most important one for today’s discussion about motivation and [02:42] reward is something that sometimes just called the reward pathway for the afficianados it’s sometimes called the [02:48] misol limic reward pathway but it’s fundamentally important to your desire [02:54] to engage in action and it’s fundamentally important for people [02:59] getting addicted to substances or behaviors so how does this work well you’ve got a structure in the Deep part [03:06] of your brain called the VTA the VTA or vental tegmental area contains neurons [03:12] that send what we call axons little wires that spit out dopamine at a [03:17] different structure called the nucleus accumbent and those two structures VTA and nucleus accumbent form really the [03:24] core Machinery of the reward pathway and the pathway that controls your motivation for anything you can think of [03:31] them like an accelerator they bias you for Action however within the reward [03:37] pathway there’s also a break the break or restriction on that dopamine which controls when it’s released and how much [03:43] it’s released is the prefrontal cortex the prefrontal cortex is the neural real estate right behind your forehead you [03:50] hear about it for decisionmaking executive function for planning Etc and indeed it’s responsible for a lot of [03:56] those it’s this really unique real estate that we were all endowed with as humans other animals don’t have much of [04:02] it we have a lot of it and that prefrontal cortex acts as a break on the dopamine system and that brings us to [04:09] the important feature of motivation which is that motivation is a two-part process which is about balancing [04:16] Pleasure and Pain so when you’re just sitting around not doing much of anything this reward pathway is [04:23] releasing dopamine at a rate of about three or four times per second it’s kind of firing in a low level if suddenly you [04:30] get excited about something you anticipate something not receive an award but you get excited in an [04:36] anticipatory way then the rate of firing the rate of [04:41] activity in this reward pathway suddenly increases to like 30 or 40 times and it [04:47] has the effect of creating a sense of action or desire to move in the direction of the thing that you’re [04:52] craving in fact it’s fair to say that dopamine is responsible for wanting and [04:58] for craving and that’s distinctly different from the way that you hear it talked about normally which is that it’s [05:03] involved in pleasure so yes dopamine is released in response to sex it’s released in response to food it’s [05:10] released in response to a lot of things but it’s mostly released in anticipation [05:15] and craving for a particular thing it has the effect of narrowing our Focus for the thing that We crave and that [05:22] thing could be as simple as a cup of coffee it could be as um important as a big board meeting it could be a big [05:27] final exam it could be uh the person that we’re excited to meet or see dopamine doesn’t care about what you’re [05:34] craving it just releases at a particular rate if we just take a step back and we look at the scientific data on how much [05:42] the dopamine firing increases in response to different things you get a pretty interesting window into how your [05:49] brain works and why you might be motivated or not motivated let’s say you’re hungry or you’re looking forward [05:54] to a cup of coffee or you’re going to see your partner well well your dopamine [06:00] neurons are firing at a low rate until you start thinking about the thing that you want or the thing that you’re [06:05] looking forward to when you eat that food the amount of dopamine that’s released in this reward pathway goes up [06:12] about 50% above Baseline sex which is fundamental to our [06:18] species continuation and reproduction sex does release dopamine and it [06:24] increases dopamine levels about 100% so basically doubles them Nic [06:30] increases the amount of dopamine about 150% above Baseline cocaine and [06:35] amphetamine increase the amount of dopamine that’s released a thousandfold within about 10 seconds of consuming the [06:42] drug however just thinking about food about sex about nicotine if you like nicotine [06:50] or cocaine or amphetamine can increase the amount of dopamine that’s released to the same degree as actually consuming [06:57] the drug now it depends in some cases for instance the cocaine user the addict [07:02] that wants cocaine can’t just think about cocaine and increase the amount of that’s released about a thousandfold [07:08] it’s actually much lower but it’s just enough to put them on the motivation track for to Crave that particular thing [07:15] now there are reasons why you would have brain circuitry like this I mean brain circuitry like this didn’t evolve to get you addicted brain circuitry like this [07:23] evolved in order to motivate behaviors toward particular goals water when you’re thirsty sex and in order to [07:30] reproduce these things and these brain areas and neurons were part of the evolutionary history that led to the [07:37] continuation of our species things like cocaine and amphetamine are disastrous [07:42] for most people because they release so much dopamine and they create these closed Loops where people then only [07:48] crave the particular thing cocaine amphetamine that leads to those massive [07:53] amounts of dopamine release most things don’t release that that level of dopamine now nowadays there’s a ton of [07:59] Interest in social media and in video games and it there have been some [08:04] measurements of the amount of dopamine released video games especially video games that have a very high update speed [08:11] where there’s novel territory all the time novelty is a big stimulus of dopamine those can release dopamine [08:17] somewhere between nicotine and cocaine so very high levels of dopamine release [08:22] social media is an interesting one because the amount of dopamine that’s released in response to logging onto [08:28] social media initi could be quite high but it seems like likely that there’s a taper in the amount of dopamine but and [08:35] yet people still get addicted so why why is it that we can get addicted to things that fail to get to elicit the same [08:42] massive amount of pleasure that they initially did being addicted to something isn’t just about the fact that [08:48] it feels so good that you want to do it over and over again and that’s because of this pleasure pain balance that [08:55] underlies motivation so let’s look a little bit closer at the pleasure pain balance because therein lies the tools [09:01] for you to be able to control motivation toward healthy things and avoid motivated behaviors towards things that [09:06] are destructive for you there are a lot of reasons why people try novel behaviors whether not those are drugs or [09:12] whether not those are Adventure thrill-seeking things or you know they take a new class as you’ll notice I’m [09:18] not placing any judgment or value on these different behaviors although I think it’s fair to point out that for [09:24] most people addictive drugs like cocaine and amphetamine are very [09:30] destructive actually we know that about 15 to 20% of people have a genetic bias [09:37] towards addiction that you know you sometimes hear that the first time that you use a drug you can become addicted [09:43] to it that’s actually not been shown to be true for most things and most people but for some people that actually is [09:49] true but in any case the way that addiction works and the way that motivation Works generally in the [09:55] non-addictive setting is that when you anticipate something a little bit of dopamine is released and then when you [10:00] reach that thing you engage in that thing the amount of dopamine goes up even further but as you repeatedly [10:07] pursue a behavior and you repeatedly engage with a particular thing let’s say you love running or you love chocolate [10:14] as you eat a piece of chocolate believe it or not it tastes good and then [10:19] there’s a shift away from activation of dopamine and there are other chemicals that are released that trigger a [10:27] low-level sense of pain now you you might not feel it as physical pain but the craving that you feel is both one [10:34] part dopamine and one part the mirror image of dopamine which is the pain or [10:39] the craving for yet another piece of chocolate and this is a very important and subtle feature of the dopamine [10:45] system that’s not often discussed people always talk about just as pleasure you love social media so it gives you [10:51] dopamine and so you engage in that you like chocolate it releases dopamine so you do that but for every bit of dopamine that’s released there’s another [10:58] circuit in the brain that creates you can think of it as kind of like a downward deflection in pleasure so you engage in something you [11:04] really want and there’s an increase in pleasure and then there’s a without you [11:10] doing anything there’s a mirror image of that which is a downward deflection and pleasure which we’re calling pain so for [11:16] every bit of pleasure there is a mirror image experience of pain and they overlap in time very closely so it’s [11:22] sometimes hard to sense this but try it the next time you eat something really delicious you’ll take a bite it tastes delicious and part of experience is to [11:30] want more of that thing this is true for any pleasureful experience now the Diabolical part about [11:36] dopamine is that because it didn’t evolve in order to get you to indulge in more and more and more of something what [11:44] happens is that initially you experience an in an increase in pleasure and you [11:51] also experience this increase in pain shortly after or woven in with the pleasure that makes you want more of [11:57] that thing but with each subsequent time that you encounter that thing the [12:03] experience of dopamine release and pleasure is diminished a little bit and [12:09] the Diabolical thing is that the pain response is increased a little bit and [12:14] this is best observed in the context of drug-seeking behavior the first time someone decides to take cocaine or [12:20] amphetamine they will experience a huge dopamine release and they will feel likely very good however the next time [12:27] they take it it won’t feel quite as good and it won’t feel even as good the third time or the next time but the amount of [12:35] pain the amount of craving that they experience for the drug will increase over time so much of our pursuit of [12:41] pleasure is simply to reduce the pain of craving so the next time you experience [12:46] something you really like I don’t want to take you out of that experience but it’s really important that you notice this that if there’s something you [12:53] really enjoy part of that enjoyment is about the anticipation and wanting of [12:58] more of that thing and that’s the pain system in action and so we can distinguish between dopamine which is [13:05] really about pleasure and dopamine which is really about motivation to pursue more in order to relieve or exclude [13:12] future pain let me repeat that dopamine isn’t as much about pleasure as much as it is about motivation and desire to [13:19] pursue more in order to reduce the amount of pain and we are now talking [13:25] about pain as a psychological pain and a craving although people that Miss a lover very badly or that really crave a [13:34] food very badly or that are addicted to a drug and can’t access it will [13:40] experience that as a physical craving and a mental craving the body and brain are linked in this way it’s almost [13:46] they’ll describe it as painful they yearn for it and I think the word yearning is one that’s very valuable in [13:52] this context because yearning seems to include a whole body experience more than just wanting which could just be up [13:58] in the mind mind so your desire for something is proportional to how [14:05] pleasureful it is to indulge in that thing but also how much pain you experience when you don’t have it and [14:11] you can now start to let your mind wander into all sorts of examples of addictions or things that you happen to [14:16] like um I’ll use the example that I sometimes use on here which is my love of croissants the taste of that [14:21] croissant makes me want to eat more croissant now eventually blood sugar goes up satiety is reached Etc what [14:27] happens then what is s isfaction and satiety about well that’s a separate neuromodulator that’s about the [14:33] neuromodulator serotonin it’s about oxytocin it’s about a hormone system [14:39] that involves something called prolactin so we’re going to talk about all all of those in the book The molecule of more [14:44] wonderful book uh those were described as the Here and Now molecules the ones that allow you to experience your [14:51] Sensations and pleasure in the present and for which the brain stops projecting into the future so now let’s talk about [14:57] craving and and the these so-called Here and Now molecules and how those engage in a kind of pushpull balance that will [15:04] allow you to not just feel more motivated but also to enjoy the things in life that you are pursuing to a much [15:11] greater degree we have neurons in an area of our brain called the rap r a p he e the RAF releases serotonin at [15:19] different places in the brain serotonin is the molecule of bliss and contentment [15:25] for what you already have I’ve talked before about exteroception exteroception [15:31] is a focus on the outside world everything beyond the confines of your skin I’ve also talked about [15:36] interoception a focus on things that are happening internally within the confines of your [15:41] skin dopamine and serotonin can be thought of as related [15:48] to exteroception dopamine makes us focused on things outside us that are beyond what we call our personal space [15:54] where we actually have to move and take action in order to achieve things and serotonin in general has to do with [16:01] the things that are in our immediate Here and Now hence the description of these as the Here and Now molecules so [16:07] it’s interesting to point out that the body and the Brain can direct its attention towards things outside us or [16:14] inside us or split our attention between those just understand that dopamine biases us toward thinking about what we [16:20] don’t have whereas serotonin and some of the related molecules like the endoc canabo if you picked up on the word [16:27] cannabinoid yes it’s like cannabis because cannabis attaches to endoc canabo receptors and the endoc canabo [16:34] are receptors and chemicals that the cannabinoids that you naturally make that are involved in things like [16:39] forgetting but you make these molecules that bind to these receptors that make you feel kind of bliss out and content [16:45] in the present so you got these two systems they’re kind of like a push pull and if you were to say do the um you [16:52] know in the book wherever you go there you are John katzin talks about this meditation practice that’s different [16:57] than most meditation prct ractic is where you eat one almond and you focus all of your attention on the Almond the [17:03] taste of the Almond the texture of the Almond that’s really a mindfulness practice that’s geared towards trying to [17:09] take a behavior which is normally about Pursuit normally feeding is we going we [17:15] engage in feeding because of dopamine we pursue more of a food because of that pleasure pain relationship I talked [17:20] about before the focus on the one almond or the or becoming very present in any [17:26] behavior that normally would be a kind of extra receptive Pursuit behavior and [17:31] bring it into the here and now that’s a mental trick or a mental task that the [17:38] mindfulness Community has really embraced in order to try and create increased pleasure for what you already [17:43] have it’s really trying to accomplish a shift from dopamine being released to serotonin in the cannabinoid system [17:51] being involved in that behavior dopamine has the quality of making people kind of rabidly in pursuit of things drugs like [17:59] marijuana the opioids anything that um really hits the serotonin system hard [18:06] tend to make people rather lethargic and content to stay exactly where they are they don’t want to pursue much at all so [18:12] you’ve got these molecules like dopamine that make you focused on the things you want and the things you crave and then [18:18] you’ve got the molecules that make you content with what you have so the most important thing perhaps in creating a [18:25] healthy emotional landscape is to have a balance between these two neuromodulator systems so at about this point in the [18:31] podcast I’m guessing that some of you are thinking okay great I want more dopamine I want to be more motivated I [18:37] don’t want to procrastinate as much and I want to be able to experience life I want these Here and Now molecules to be [18:43] released as well well there is a way to do that but you have to understand the source of procrastination is not one [18:50] thing there are basically two kinds of procrastinators or so says the research [18:55] the first kind are people that actually really enjoy the stress of the impending [19:01] deadline it’s the only way they can get into action there are other procrastinators for which they simply [19:06] are not releasing enough dopamine for those people there are a variety of things that can increase dopamine I do [19:11] suggest you talk to a psychiatrist or doctor I’ve talked about makuna purines which is [19:17] 99.9% L Doopa the precursor to dopamine there are anti-depressants like [19:23] Wellbutrin Bryon is the other name for it which increase dopamine and epinephrine [19:29] however if you think back to our earlier discussion about dopamine dopamine if it’s very high [19:37] creates a sense of pleasure and the desire for more so you can also become a [19:42] person for which enough is Never Enough the only thing that dopamine really wants is more of the thing that releases [19:49] dopamine and so one of the things that you can do in order to generally just be a happier person especially if you’re a [19:55] person in pursuit of long-term goals of any kind is the longer that you can [20:00] extend that positive phase of the dopamine release and the more that you can blunt the pain response to that the [20:08] better and you can actually do this cognitively I used to joke with my lab that when we’d publish a paper I would [20:13] get really excited but I wouldn’t allow myself to get too excited what I wanted to do instead and what I’ve still tried [20:19] to do is try and extend the Arc of that positive experience as long as I possibly can simply by thinking back [20:25] like oh that was really cool I really enjoy doing that work I really enjoyed the discovery I really enjoyed doing [20:30] that with the people that I was working with at the time what a pleasure that was so you can extend pleasure without [20:37] having to engage in the behavior over and over that’s extending the Arc of that dopamine release as well it offsets [20:44] some of the pain of not having that experience occur over and over and over [20:49] again now for the high performers out there you’re probably familiar with this many people who have a big achievement [20:55] their first thoughts are well now what what am I going to do next how am I ever going to exceed that and indeed many people who are very high on this kind of [21:02] dopamine sensation and novelty-seeking scale uh are prone to addiction they’re prone to the Rabid pursuit of external [21:08] goals of exter reception to the neglect of these internal mechanisms that allow them to feel calm and happy so for [21:15] people that are very driven very motivated adopting a practice of being able to engage in the here and now the [21:22] sort of omen type practices we talked about earlier um of learning how to [21:27] achieve a really good night’s sleep on a regular basis through tools and mechanisms I talked about in previous [21:32] podcast gives us sort of balance to the pleasure seeking and offsetting of pain [21:38] and the pleasure in the here and now so pleasure is really two things it’s a joy in [21:44] Pursuit but it’s also the joy in what you have the cool thing is you can [21:49] actually regulate this whole system in a way that will steer you or lean you [21:55] towards more positive anticipation of things in life and less disappointment it’s simply a matter of adjusting what [22:01] we call the dopamine schedule in order to understand how to control the dopamine system how to leverage it for a [22:08] better life you need to understand the results of a very important [22:13] experiment this experiment was able to separate pleasure from motivation it’s a [22:20] very simple but like many simple experiments a very elegant experiment [22:25] what they did and this has now been done in animals and in humans they offered rats food it was a food [22:32] that they particularly liked and the animals would lever press for rep pellet of food kind of classic experiment [22:38] they’d eat the food and they presumably like the food because they were motivated to press the lever and eat it [22:45] great they took other rats they eliminated the dopamine [22:50] neurons you can do this by injection of a neurotoxin that destroys these neurons so they actually had no dopamine in [22:56] their brain they have no ability to release dopamine and they gave them a lever the rats [23:02] would sit there and they’d hit the lever and they’d eat the food they’re still enjoyed the food so you say well okay so [23:08] dopamine isn’t involved in motivation it isn’t involved in pleasure no it absolutely is they could still enjoy the [23:15] food but if they moved the rat literally one body length away from the lever what [23:21] they found was the animals that had dopamine would move over to the lever press it and eat and the ones the rats [23:27] that did not have dopamine available to them wouldn’t even move one body length [23:32] one rat length to the lever in order to press it and get the food dopamine [23:37] therefore is not about the ability to experience pleasure it is about motivation for pleasure and so many of [23:44] you are probably thinking wow I’m not a very motivated person like you talked about the one kind of procrastination [23:49] earlier what about when I just feel kind of meh about life now for some of you there may be a real clinical depression [23:56] and you should talk to a professional there are very good prescription drugs that can really help people there’s also [24:02] great non-drug treatments of uh Psychotherapy and other treatments that are being developed in addition to [24:09] psychotherapy and the various kinds of psychoanalysis Etc that one can use I think the data really point to the fact [24:15] that a combination of pharmacology and talk therapies are generally best and [24:20] there are a huge range of these things I know many of you are in these professions so we’re not going to talk about that right now there is a compound [24:26] that’s kind of interesting in the supplement space that isn’t um munan alopa it’s not El tyrosine that isn’t [24:34] promoting massive releases of dopamine or even dopamine alone but a combination [24:40] of dopamine and serotonin and it’s an intriguing molecule it’s um sold over the counter again you have to check with [24:46] your Healthcare um uh provider before you would take anything or remove anything that’s very important but it’s [24:52] phenol ethyl amine or pea pea [24:58] or beta phenol ethyl aiming releases dopamine at low levels but also [25:05] serotonin at low level so it’s kind of a cocktail of the motivation molecules as [25:10] well as the quote unquote Here and Now molecules and people’s response to this [25:15] varies widely but many people report feeling heightened sense of mental [25:21] acuity well-being Etc it is a bit of a stimulant like anything that triggers activation of the dopamine and [25:27] norepinephrine pathway but is an interesting supplement so now let’s talk about what is a dopamine schedule and [25:32] how you can leverage this in order to have heightened levels of motivation but not get so much dopamine that you’re [25:39] experiencing a crash afterwards and also so that you can experience heightened pleasure from the various Pursuits that [25:44] you are engaged in in life and here’s the key principle dopamine is very subjective [25:52] meaning you can either allow yourself to experience the pleasure of reaching a milestone of a achieving or some craving [26:00] or not it’s actually pretty powerful what one can do with the subjective system in fact I’m going to describe you [26:07] an experiment that highlights just how powerful the subjective readout or the subjective interpretation of a given [26:14] experience really can be even at the level of pharmacology and the title of the experiment is expectation for [26:21] stimulant type modifies caffeine’s effects on mood and cognition this was [26:26] done in college students it’s a f fascinating study what they did is they [26:31] gave college students either Placebo essentially nothing or 200 [26:38] milligrams of caffeine 200 milligrams of caffeine is about what’s in a typical coffee like a medium coffee that you [26:44] would buy a drip coffee so they took 65 undergraduate students in college they randomized them [26:51] to either Placebo or caffeine and they told them that they were either getting [26:57] caffeine or adero now Aderall cognitively carries a very [27:02] different um expectation college students know Aderall to be a much stronger stimulant than caffeine they [27:09] know it to create a sort of high this is the way the students described it and they thought that it would increase [27:14] their level of focus and their ability to perform work so what’s really interesting is there [27:20] was definitely an effect of placebo versus caffeine that’s not surprising however right you take a placebo you may [27:26] or may not feel more alert um but you take 200 milligrams of caffeine very likely you’re going to feel very alert but there was also an [27:33] effect of whether or not the students thought they were getting caffeine or Aderall the subjects receiving caffeine [27:40] reported feeling more stimulated anxious and motivated than the subjects that received the placebo okay but the ones [27:46] that expected Aderall reported stronger amphetamine effects they performed better on a working memory test and in [27:53] general they had all the increased cognitive effects that would have been seen with adol but they were only [28:00] ingesting caffeine so it led to heightened performance simply because the students thought they were getting [28:07] Aderall and I think this is very important because I think that it points to the fact that the the the top down [28:14] the kind of higher level cognitive processes are impacting even the most basic fundamental aspects of say [28:20] dopamine release or our uh adrenaline release or epinephrine release in ways that can positively impact performance [28:26] in this case it was a positive Improvement in working memory and focus so today we’ve talked a lot about the [28:33] dopamine system and and those kinds of schedules that will allow craving or [28:38] addiction but what’s the schedule of dopamine that’s going to allow you to maximize on your pursuit of pleasure and [28:45] your elimination of pain and we get the answer to that from our good friend [28:51] gambling the reason gambling works the reason why people will throw their lives away the reason why people go back again [28:58] and again and again to places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City is because of [29:05] the hope and anticipation it’s a those are cities and places built on dopamine they are leveraging your dopamine system [29:11] and as a friend of mine who’s a certified addiction treatment specialist tells me that you know gambling addiction is a particularly Sinister [29:19] because the next time really could be the thing that changes everything unlike other addictions the next time really [29:25] could change everything and that’s embedded in the mind of the gambling addict and rarely does it work out uh in [29:31] favor of the well-being of the gambling addict and their family however the intermittent reinforcement schedule was [29:38] discovered Long Ago by scientific researchers so this is the slot machine that every once in a while gives you a [29:44] win to keep you playing this is the the probability of winning on the craps table or the roulette table or at [29:50] Blackjack just often enough that you’re willing to buy tickets head out there play again go downstairs again from your [29:57] room even though you swear you were done for the night intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful form of dopamine [30:03] reward schedule to keep you doing something so we can export that we can use it for good if there’s something [30:10] that you’re pursuing in life whether or not it’s an academic goal or a financial goal or relationship [30:15] goal one of the things that you can do to ensure that you will remain on the path to that goal for a very long time [30:21] and that you will continue to exceed your previous performance as well as continue to enjoy the dopamine Rel that [30:28] occurs when you hit the Milestones that you want to achieve is to occasionally [30:34] remove reward subjectively let’s say you set out a goal of making I’m going to [30:40] make this quantitative with respect to finances because it just is an easy description but this could also be in [30:45] sport this could be in school this could be in music could be in anything creative Endeavors but let’s say you set out a certain Financial goal or let’s [30:52] say you want to get a certain number of followers on whatever social media platform as you reach each one of those [30:58] goals you should know now that the amount of dopamine is not going to Peak it’s actually going to diminish and make [31:03] you crave more the key to avoiding that crash but to still keep it in healthy [31:08] levels that will allow you to continue your Pursuit is as you are staircasing toward your goal you actually want to [31:15] blunt the reward response for some of those intermediate goals now I’m not telling you you shouldn’t celebrate your [31:21] wins but I’m telling you not to celebrate all of them or as a good friend of mine who uh recently uh [31:27] fortunately for him uh had a great financial success he asked me and somebody else a good friend of mine [31:33] who’s very tuned into dopamine reward schedules understands how they work at a really deep level and he said I don’t [31:38] know what to do next and we said oh well that’s simple you should just give most of it away and this wasn’t a ploy to [31:45] receive any of the money ourselves this was really about reducing the impact of that reward now hopefully giving him [31:52] money away if you already have enough of it would be something that was rewarding in and of itself but if you’re a student [31:58] who’s pursuing goals in University or you’re an athlete who’s pursuing goals [32:03] it actually makes sense from a rational perspective once you understand these mechanisms to hit a new high point of [32:12] performance or to get that A+ or for you if it’s an A minus Etc and to tell [32:18] yourself okay that was good but to actually actively blunt the reward to [32:23] not go and celebrate too intensely because in doing that you keep your dopamine system in check and you ensure [32:31] that you’re going to stay on the path of continued Pursuit not just for that thing but for all things big increases [32:37] in dopamine lead to big crashes in dopamine and big increases in dopamine up the anti so you can lift the uh what [32:45] Las Vegas and Atlantic City and other gambling uh mechanisms and places have [32:50] known for a long time they lifted it from the scientists you can now take it back and you can start to leverage that [32:56] and you just make it intermittent you reward yourself not on a predictable schedule so not every other time or [33:02] every third time or every 10th time but sometimes it’s three in a row then not at all for 10 days so reward is [33:09] important self-reward is critically important but make sure that you’re not doing it on such a predictable schedule [33:15] that you burn out these dopamine circuits or that you undercut your own ability to strive and Achieve hopefully [33:24] you now know far more about the dopamine system reward and motivation than you [33:29] did at the beginning of this podcast hopefully you also understand the other side of dopamine and reward which is [33:35] pain and the balance of this pleasure pain system as well as the molecules that we call or that were described in [33:42] the molecule of more book I should say as the Here and Now molecules things like serotonin and the endoc canabo [33:49] finally I want to thank you for your time and attention today I hope you learned a lot and that you learned a lot [33:54] of possible tools that you could incorporate into your life as it relates to motivation and emotions thank you for [34:01] your interest in science [Music]